


to wash in snow

by nanrea



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubble, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanrea/pseuds/nanrea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a lot of memories locked in the snow out here.  The light is nice, but the cold is not.  Rose introduces Kanaya to winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. meteorlogical phenomena

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gregariousProtagonist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gregariousProtagonist/gifts).



It's very bright here, which is nice. It's also very cold, which is both unpleasant and unfamiliar to you, having been raised in the deserts of Alternia, where the seasons vary only in how dark they get. Even the Meteor, as dank and chilly as it gets sometimes, is never this cold. You recognize the hive and blanket of white from your time watching Rose during those ten hours between the catastrophic loss of your session and leaving your medium for the Green Sun: this is her home, and you are in her dream bubble.

White powder coats the ground and floats down gently from the sky. Silence and stillness and cold settle around you as you wade through the powder toward Rose's hive. It comes up to your knees and is surprisingly hard to walk through, catching and dragging at your skirt and coating it with small clinging particles. Each step kicks some of the white stuff up the inside of your long skirt, and your legs quickly get cold and damp. The powder from the sky melts when it lands on you, proving to be water when you taste it. How very cold this place must be, to freeze water. You are surprised the humans would choose to live in this sort of climate.

The sudden scraping noise is very loud in the silence this place seems to embody. As you round the corner of the hive, you see what is causing it: Rose, wielding a shallowly curved rectangle at the end of a pole, is moving the powder off to the side of a patch of ground into a mound next to the hive. The exposed skin of her face is bright pink with exertion. She is wearing a bulky lavender jacket, dark pants, heavy boots of a bright white, and on her head is a lavender and white striped hat pulled down over her ears. Her hands are covered in matching mittens. These clothes had mystified you the first time you'd seen them, but now, in the frozen memory of the dream bubble, their utility is clear. 

Rose's activity, however, is still a mystery. You wait for several moments on the edge of the cleared space, rubbing your arms and waiting for her to notice you. 

"Rose," you say after several moments. "What are you doing?"

She answers without looking up, "Shoveling the drive way before Mother wakes up."

"Why?"

"Because then she will . . . " Rose pauses her activity, looks around. The puzzled vulnerability that flashes across her flushed face does odd things to the rhythm of your pump biscuit. Finally she seems to notice your presence. "Kanaya. What are you doing here?"

Waking up in a dream bubble by reliving a memory is never particularly pleasant, but Rose seems to fair worst when they are memories of her old hive. "We're in a dream bubble," you say. 

She turns and looks at the tree line in the distance, then full circle to look at the hive behind you. Orienting herself. You wait, holding your arms close to your sides. Finally, she faces you again. "You must be cold. Let's get a change of scenery, shall we?"

"Wait," you say before you think better of it. "I like it here. It's so . . . bright."

She blinks rapidly several times. "Ah," she says. A slight smile quirks her lips, before falling flat again. "Still, though, let me grab you a coat. You look rather uncomfortable."

The jade flooding your cheeks in the stinging chill could not get any deeper, but now you feel like your whole face must be green. "Thank you," you say as she props the frozen precipitate removal apparatus against the side of her hive and walks to the nearest entrance. You trail behind her, enjoying the contrast between her colored clothing and the white and grey of everything else.

The hive is dark compared to outside, and you stand on the threshold watching as Rose opens a small closet next to the entryway, convenient for storing outdoor gear. The utility of this strikes you as highly convenient, though you hadn't needed such a thing in your own desert hive. Rose retrieves a long coat in a delicate shade of salmon and grimaces. The coat seems too large for Rose, so it had probably been her lusus's, you think. She shoves it at you.

"Try it on," she says. "Everything else in here is probably too small."

The coat is thick and made of some shiny, synthetic material different from the coarse fibers of Rose's coat. It is too big, and hangs halfway down your shins once you get it zipped closed, but the warmth from being inside the hive, combined with the insulation of the coat, is immediately welcome.

Rose has already turned back into the closet, fishing around on the shelf above her head for more items. She pulls down a hat, a purple mitten, three gloves of three different colors, a long striped scarf, and a pair of what Jade had called earmuffs so long ago during their doomed session when you'd last seen similar items. Picking two gloves that seemed most similar, the ear muffs, and the scarf, she offers you a motley assortment to choose from.

You take the scarf and wrap it around your neck and settle the muffs over your ears, which had been stinging with cold. Pulling the gloves on, you follow her back outside. Together, you stand in the cleared square of ground.

The stillness and the bright seem to settle into you. It's still bitingly cold, but now, insulated from it to some degree, you can allow the beauty of the place to overwhelm the unpleasant chill.

You turn to look at Rose, and are surprised to see that she's watching you already. Her eyes are wide under the brim of her hat, and they seem to suck in the lavender of her coat until they are the only source of color. Puffs of white from her breath float between you and dissipate, and you feel as snared by her presence now as you had been by the still bright white a moment ago.

"Your face is so green," she says, breaking the silence. You can't determine the tone of her voice: bemusement? Wonder? Her own cheeks are flushed pink again, with the cold or with something else, you couldn't say.

"Hah," a sharp exhalation. You turn away quickly, holding the scarf up over your cheeks. "So what is this precipitation you are removing called? I am quite unfamiliar with it." Babbling. You wonder again if your cheeks could feel any greener.

"Oh." She turns, her own cheeks growing even pinker. You will both expire of blood loss through the cheeks, you think. "Snow. You didn't have snow on Alternia?"

"Not in the habitable zones," you reply. "I believe there was great accumulation of precipitate water gathered in high latitudes, but few trolls ventured into such areas. Our world wasn't subject to as much variation in seasons as your planet was." 

"And you lived in the desert, did you not? I imagine it never got cold there."

"It could get quite cool at night, actually," you say. "Though indeed, never so cold as this." Your breath puffs out in front of you, visibly white in the air. 

Rose grinned, a surprisingly genuine expression, as she started toward the blanket of snow coating her lawn ring. "And it's not even that cold today. Only in the mid twenties."

"Is this 'mid twenties' a human temperature indicator?" 

"Yes. The Fahrenheit system. I apologize for being so dismayingly American in using it, but Celsius just never felt quite as natural."

"Ah. Literally nothing of what you just said made any sense to me." You trail after her as she begins breaking a trail through the snow. You had already learned that walking through snow in a floor length skirt is singularly unpleasant, and are not very eager to follow her now that she decides to go tromping through it. 

She looks over her shoulder at you, a mischievous glint in her eye. "In the Fahrenheit system, water freezes at a temperature of thirty-two degrees above zero. In winter the temperature often stays below that for long periods of time. At this time of year, being only five or ten degrees below the freezing point of water is considered quite pleasant."

"Ah." That sounds horrible. You pause on the edge of the cleared ground. "Where are you going?"

She stoops down where she stands and scoops up a bunch of snow. You see where this is going, and take a step back. "Rose--" Before you get much more out than that she whips around and lobs the snow ball at you, giggling as the loosely packed stuff explodes against your hair as you try to duck away from it. "Hey!"

Still giggling, she turns and tries to run deeper into the lawn ring, an awkward half jumping gait that looks ridiculous. A titter escapes your lips as you stoop and clumsily imitate her earlier moves, gathering up a loosely packed ball and standing, taking careful aim at the silly poof of yarn on the top of her hat and throwing. 

The ball misses, hitting her shoulder with a poof. She giggles and stumbles, landing awkwardly on her knees. You watch bemusedly as she proceeds to flop onto her side and roll to her back, laying spread eagle and swallowed up by white. 

"Are you all right?" you call, somewhat alarmed. You gingerly step into the path she'd forged, trying to keep the snow from going up your skirt again. She hadn't gone very far, and in six steps you're standing above her. She looks surprisingly peaceful, laying with her eyes closed a slight smile playing at her lips.

"Kanaya," she says.

You lean down. "Rose, what are you-"

The leg closest to you sweeps out and bowls you over, landing you on your bottom in the snow, a surprisingly soft landing that doesn't prevent an undignified squawk from erupting out. Giggling again, Rose surges up out of the snow and knocks you on your back into it, grabbing a fistful of snow and rubbing it on your head. "Hey! Rose, Rose, stop!" 

It's easy to grab her arms and flip her off. She rolls in the snow, still giggling, and you can only sit up and watch, perplexed. Catching a glance of your face only seems to make her laugh harder and she curls up around herself in the snow, clutched by a fit of near breathless gasping snickers. It goes on long enough that you start to feel alarmed. "Rose. Rose, are you all right?"

You put a hand on her shoulder, a disturbingly pale gesture, you're sure, but you don't know what else to do. You've never seen anything like this before, like she is unable to control her laughter or calm herself down. Leaning close, you're surprised to see the strangely clear human tears leaking from her eyes. She's laughing silently now, shudders wracking her in between sharp gasps, and she buries her face in her gloved hands. Each breath she draws seems to set off another gasp of desperate giggling. 

You roll up onto your knees and grab both of her shoulders, pushing her shoulders flat to the ground. "Rose, please! Rose, what's wrong?"

She just gasps again and waves a hand, trying to take a breath. Another gasp, another. A breathy "Sorry," another gasping inhalation. You lean back a little as the next breath seems to come more easily, but keep your hands on her shoulders, watching her. Clear tears continue to seep from her clenched shut eyes and her whole face is flushed with blood and you've never seen her so discomposed.

Her breathing evens out at last and you sit back on your heels next to her. You don't know what to say, don't know how to broach this new silence. She lays in the snow, stretched out, hands on her stomach, eyes closed, seemingly content now just to breath deeply.

"Sorry," she says after a moment, quietly.

"Why?"

"I don't . . . this . . . this is always the worst place to wake up in." She goes silent again. You think of the times the dream bubbles have taken you to your own lost home, and say nothing.

The shift is barely perceptible, but you no longer feel cold. Preoccupied with watching her face slowly lose its hectic flush, you are surprised when you notice the snow being replaced by sand. A glance tells you the dream bubble has transitioned to Rose's Land of Light and Rain.

She sits up beside you, pulls her hat off to shake sand off of it. "I've never had hysterical laughter before," she says.

"I've never heard of such a thing," you say. So many strange new human terms today.

"Hmm," she fingers the hat in her lap. "I . . ." She seems to change her mind about what to say. "I'll make you a hat, just in case we ever end up in a New York winter again."

You look back at her, tilting your head. You take one of her hands, stilling her restless fingers. "That would be nice," you say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to the dream dictionary I got at a garage sale a few years ago, dreaming of snow is a good omen: deep snow indicates a big reward after hard work, seasonal variables all indicate positive growth, and to dream of shoveling snow "augers help from influential friends." Washing in snow indicates an end to any troubles you now have. Not a bad discovery to make while flailing around for a title to this thing.
> 
> Dreaming of lavender, by the way, indicates minor and transitory unhappiness, while green pertains to travel, and to dream of people who are "some exotic shade like green or blue (or grey)" means "the dream probably had a digestive origin and no significance," which is why you should never put too much stock in dream dictionaries.


	2. some weeks later, but not many

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bonus illustration!

_or this is how it could have ended . . ._  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of Kanaya in a winter hat was just too tempting to resist.


End file.
